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Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic and the stresses on university and library budgets it has brought will inevitably drive changes in library practice, but these changes were already under way and the pandemic has simply accelerated them. The changes were driven by a transformation in the technologies used to create, discover, provide access to, and preserve scholarly content. The migration of scholarly content from print on paper to digital documents on a worldwide network changed everything. Changes this big happen slowly, and this transition has been going on for some time. In 1992, when scholarly content in digital form and the Internet were just becoming widely available, Michael Buckland wrote, "Hitherto library services have been dominated by local catalogs, local collections, and great inequalities in the geographical distribution of services. The constraints on library service are changing right now. … All of this requires us to think again about the mission of the library, the role of the library, and the means of providing service. For the first time in one hundred years we face the grand and difficult challenge of redesigning library service" (1992, 76). Thirty years on, the transition to digital networked content is complete. The contours of this redesign are clear, and they will be discussed in detail below.
The focus of this article is on what has been traditionally called "Collections," though for reasons that will become clear "Resource Acquisition Model" is a better term. We focus on this aspect of library practice because we believe that Buckland is correct when he says, "The central purpose of libraries is to provide a service: access to information" (1992, 1). Changing the resource allocation model is also essential because this is where the largest portion of the library's budget is spent. This includes the materials expenditures, but also a significant part of the library's staffing. The process can, and in current circumstances must, be made more efficient. The simple fact is that academic libraries cannot maintain their past practices, so the choice is to do less and less the old way or to find new more efficient ways to meet users' needs.
The theoretical basis for this has been laid out by one of the authors (Lewis 2015a, 2015b, 2016) and will be summarized...